Page 116 of The Secret

He huffed. “Keep me on speaker phone. I actually do have a problem that I need to talk about.”

I wiped a wet hand down my ruined pants.

“Okay, hang on.” I opened my office door, “Joan, can you get some towels or something please? The juice spilled everywhere.”

I didn’t wait for her reply because I knew she’d be on it, and walked into my bathroom, stripping off my shirt as I went and threw it in the laundry, along with my pants.

“Okay, shoot. What’s up?” I called out to him as I turned on the faucet to wash off the smell of spirulina.

“Fucking Beulah Holmes.”

I stared at my confused face in the mirror. “Have we gone back twelve years?”

“What?”

I grabbed a towel from the rail. “It’s been a while since we’ve had some Beulah bashing.”

“Can you shut up? This is serious.”

“I’m shutting up.”

“Remember I told you about that divorce case my mom wanted help with?”

“Yes, the one that wasn’t Chip.”

“Right, her friend. I said I’d take it because, get this,” he paused for dramatic effect, “she’s divorcing Johnson Maynard.”

The effect worked. I stopped what I was doing. “That crook? He belongs in jail, not a divorce court. Fuck, that must be worth billions.”

“Yeah, you’d think, except he’s hiding it somewhere, because the spreadsheets say he’s only worth twenty mil. Plus they met in college when he had no money and there’s no pre-nup. He’s a vicious fuck, and I’m going to enjoy taking him down.”

I whistled low.

“Wow.” I opened my wardrobe, pulling out a fresh pair of pants and a cleanly pressed shirt. “What’s this got to do with Beulah Holmes?”

He let out an exasperated sigh like I was already supposed to know what he was talking about, or at least guessed. “She’s the opposing counsel. They’ve transferred her from the Mouths of Hell to the New York office.”

It’s a good job I’d already spilled my juice because if there was any left, I’d have spat it out instead. Fuck, I wish Penn was on this call. Where the fuck was he?

“Holy shit.”

As if he’d telepathically understood the urgency of his presence, a beep sounded. “Hang on, his highness is here.”

I pulled my pants on, extracting the belt from my green juice pair, pushing it through the loops.

“Pennington, wait until you hear this! There’s a dart board we need to dust off!” I called loudly.

“Sounds exciting, which one?”

“Raf, tell him.”

There was silence where there should have been a flurry of conversation and Penn pissing himself laughing.

“Penn?” I pulled the shirt off the hanger and pushed my arms through the sleeves. “Raf?”

Morons clearly couldn’t use technology and cut themselves off instead. I walked out of the bathroom and halted, blinking hard at the view in front of me. A view that had my dick almost crawling back inside me.

I turned round to the bathroom again. Where the fuck had I just come from and how long had I been in there? My office door was shut, and how in the hell did she get past Joan?

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